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 ART
N 72
R4 C29

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE
OF ART

CARPENTER
|
THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE

OF ART.
 Art was given for that
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
FRA LIPPO LIPPI. Robert ng.
THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE

OF ART.

BY

EDWARD CARPENTER , B.A.

FELLOW OF TRINITY HALL,

Cambridge:
DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO.
LONDON : BELL AND DALDY .
1870.
jw
 N 72
.RA C29

INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Cambridge :
PRINTED BY C. J. CI.AY, M. A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS .
 THE late RICHARD BURNEY, ESQ., M.A., of Christ's
49-82-6

College, Cambridge, previously to his death on the 30th

Nov. 1845, empowered his Cousin, Mr Archdeacon Bur
ney, to offer, through the Vice-Chancellor, to the Uni
versity of Cambridge, the sum of £ 3,500 Reduced Three
per Cent. Stock, for the purpose of establishing an Annual
Prize, to be awarded to the Graduate who should pro
duce the best Essay on a subject to be set by the Vice
Chancellor.
On the day after this offer was communicated to the
Vice -Chancellor, Mr Burney died ; but his sister and
executrix, Miss J. Caroline Burney, being desirous of
carrying her brother's intentions into effect, generously
renewed the offer.
The Prize is to be awarded to a Graduate of the
University, who is not of more than three years' standing
from admission to his first degree when the Essays are
sent in, and who shall produce the best English Essay
“ on some moral or metaphysical subject, on the Exist
ence, Nature, and Attributes of God, or on the Truth
and Evidence of the Christian Religion .” The successful
Candidate is required to print his Essay ; and after
having delivered, or caused to be delivered, a copy of
it to the University Library, the Library of Christ's
 vi

College, the University Libraries of Oxford, Dublin, and

Edinburgh, and to each of the Adjudicators of the Prize,
he is to receive from the Vice-Chancellor the year's
interest of the Stock, from which sum the Candidate is
to pay the expenses of printing the Essay.
The Vice- Chancellor, the Master of Christ's College,
and the Norrisian Professor of Divinity, are the Ex
aminers of the Compositions and the Adjudicators of the
Prize.
In the event of the exercises of two of the Candidates
being deemed by the Examiners to possess equal merit,
if one of such Candidates be a member of Christ's College,
the Prize is to be adjudged to him.
The subject proposed by the Vice-Chancellor for the
year 1869 was :
The legitimate province of Architecture, Painting, and Music, in the
service of Religion.

The Prize was awarded to the author of the following Essay.

 CHAPTER I.

INintrying toestimatethe influence of Art or its importance

the service of Religion, we seem to assume that Art has
at any rate some relation to Religion. Yet this is, at the
outset, a proposition which many would decline to accept.
The general position of Art is indeed from its very nature
extremely difficult to determine. If it is true, as many
perhaps would maintain, that it deals with or unites two
seemingly opposed ideas, the spiritual and the material, it
seems likely enough that, on one side, people would incline
to treat its influence as nothing but a more or less refined
impression on the sensual nerves ; or, on the other hand,
would be content to remove it from everyday life into a
mere sentiment ' vague as all unsweet,' easily mistaken for
true religious feeling.
It is, I think, unnecessary to enter elaborately into any
theory on the nature of Art. But there is a point in which
it must always come into very close contact with Religion,
whatever we may hold concerning its origin. There can be
no doubt, it seems to me, that, whether it be in music or in
architecture or in painting, true Art does, without exception,
suggest to the mind the existence of something which is
 2

beyond, though ever present in, the sphere of everyday

life ; something which cannot easily be expressed at all,
never clearly, which yet we feel to be akin with our deepest
consciousness. I do not think that anyone who has loved
music can be ignorant of the irresistible sense it awakens of
another world, as it were, flowing ceaselessly around us, into
which we are for the time translated with a passing insight
into its mystery ; nor is it possible to stand amidst beautiful
architecture, whether it be in some joyous conception of
human Art, or amongst the woods and mountains of Nature's
handiwork, without experiencing that feeling of strange
wonder and delight, whose very indefiniteness seems to im
print it all the deeper on our minds. Whatever its phase, and
Art has many phases, it always comes to us with the sense of
something veiled, of something still half -unexpressed, which
in its fulness we desire yet find not.
So it happens too that no true artist is ever thoroughly
satisfied with his work ; that is the penalty of his greatness ;
though he wonder at its beauty, that very wonder oppresses
him with the sense of all that is unexpressed and unshapen.
Whatever then be the real nature of this mystery of Art,
whether its existence be merely fanciful or whether it be
founded on all truth, I say that, in that point, Art does bring ✓
us into contact with Religion. It is essentially opposed to a
mere so-called Positivism , which really rejoices in negatives ;
it is essentially opposed to a mere worldly spirit. The true
artist, or any who truly rejoice in Art, cannot be worldly ;
that is to say, with them the interests of ordinary life have
bowed before the indescribable sense of something invisible.
Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse is to them the
 3

evidence of things not seen ; and therefore true Art, as Words

worth says ,

Requires the service of a mind and heart

Though sensitive, yet in its weakest part
Heroically fashioned.
It is a continual protest against that cowardly spirit which
often , under the falsely - so -called name of science, would seek
protection from the dreaded imputation of believing anything
which it cannot prove, or of feeling any enthusiasm for what
may possibly be an object of ridicule to others ; and while
such weakness of spirit will degrade a man of culture so far
as to render him incapable of any effective work, the true
scientific spirit or the true artistic spirit will, as may so often
be seen, give permanent refinement to men of the meanest
birth and education .

But I think that there are other, and more direct, ways in
which Art comes into contact with Religion. If beauty in
Art does excite in us anything more than a mere sensual
pleasure, if in fact it provokes in the mind trains of thoughtV
and emotion, dimly enough perhaps realised yet sufficient to
hold us with a strange power, it must be because the laws of
material nature, by means of which the artistic spirit is ex
pressed, are in some sort of correspondence with the invisible
world of thought and feeling, and so serve to wake into action
that spiritual world within us.
It is this correlation between the visible and the invisible

kingdoms which is at once the stumblingblock and the clue

in all theories of Art. It lies so near us that we are not in a
position to contemplate it, so to speak, from without. The
two worlds run so close and intermingle with each other so
 4

gradually that we cannot even draw the line of separation

between them. Nay, if we take the analogy of all Nature,
we may well believe that we never shall be able to draw the
line of separation ; but rather that we shall at last behold
them both , as part of one great plan, identical in their essence
though diverse in outward manifestation ",
We cannot then say how this linking together of mind
and matter takes place, but we know that it is present with
us in every act of consciousness. And so we may, in some
sort, understand that if the outward world is the creation of
One, and the laws of Nature the eternal modes of His opera
tion, all the visible universe must indeed be a reflection, as it
were, of His mind ; and as we look upon it, if there is any
thing of divinity within us, it must leap forth to embrace that
which it recognises as the manifestation of a kindred spirit.
Nature in her fulness is God's art. Man is in a different

position ; he cannot (as far as we know at present) create his

materials, but must make use of what Nature gives him,
imitating and studying her till he is in some sort master of
1 It is useless to say that all our feelings of Beauty are only so many combi
nations of impressions derived from without, but have no further groundwork
than that. As has been so often said before, the very faculty of receiving these
feelings from without implies the pre-existence of something within us before our
contact with the external world. Indeed the merest sensual impressions imply a
receptive power, and the more science advances the more it shews us that our
own sensations of light, colour, sound, odour, &c. have apparently no necessary
connection with the particular movement of nature to which we ascribe them, but
are only linked from the beginning to those external movements, so as to become
always associated with them in our minds. And thus, as perception of hue or
sound is a mysteriously innate fitness or correspondence between the external world
and the mind, so is the perception of beauty in Art a fitness between the artistic
production and an idea similarly pre-existent in us through an inward birth. Art is
in fact symbolical, and arises both in perception and creation—that is, in the
fitting of the mind to the external world and in the fitting of the external world to
the mind .
 5

those outward things, and then using them to reflect again

some little ray of the divine light which has found a home
within him.

If then there is any truth in all this, we may well believe

that Nature, in her splendour and her humility, in her labour
and her repose, in her widefelt sympathy and her awe
inspiring changelessness, does indeed tell us something of
the attributes of Him who fills her with life, and may truly
excite in us emotions akin to the deepest religion. And what
Nature does in her bounty, man's Art may follow out in lesser
completeness. All men feel the desire to express that which
is in them . Some appreciate and seize with a sudden inspi
ration the fitness of the visible world for that expression.
These are the world's artists ; they have the divine power
(which all perhaps have in some degree) of giving light to the
hidden thoughts within them by the symbolism of Nature .
On the other hand, more men can appreciate the import of
this symbolism without being able so readily to bend it to
their own use ; they are the great audience of Nature and of
Art. Often they feel more deeply and rejoice more in the
message than those whose tongues are not bound, but they
cannot impart it so readily to others. Yet if their feelings
are true they cannot resist the wish somehow or other to
express that which has found a home in their hearts ; and if
not with chisel or pencil, yet in word and life to strive to
picture forth that beauty which has been revealed to them.
So true art, at any time, ought to imply both ' being and
doing,' reception of the beautiful, and the endeavour to
express it, to pass it on again to all the world.
Man's art must not, therefore, be thought to be a mere
 6

useless imitation of Nature. For though it may be said to be

burdened with the same messages, yet to many it speaks
with clearer tones than Nature does ; for Nature is so ex
uberant, so overpowering in her fulness, that we are often
bewildered by her, and cannot carry away anything but a
vague astonishment at her greatness ; but the artist can take
some part of her message and, omitting the mass of her
detailed beauty, convey a smaller meaning, it is true, but one
more easily understood . Nor is it necessary that a fuller
development of our receptive powers should cause us to
discard all human art in favour of Nature. There is a
pleasure in the sympathetic communication of ideas among
fellow men, which can never perish ; and may we not also
add that in all men there is an originality, ever new in itself
and ever of varying interest in its expression, which will
always render his highest works valuable, even in the presence
of Nature's transcendent teaching ?
In the attempt of the spirit to mould the external world
into some kind of expression of itself, there ensues a struggle,
as it were, between the spiritual and the material, between
the active and the inert throughout all Nature, between that
which tends to life and that which tends to death. In this
struggle, the triumph of the spiritual gives rise to what we
term perfect beauty or felicitous expression. The material
is moulded into perfect consonance with the hidden idea, and
the beholder is filled with the most unbounded delight as that
perfect fitness flashes upon him too as it flashed upon the
forming mind.
When the struggle is on the side of the material, and the
spirit is in danger of suffering defeat, there arises in the
 7

beholder, according to the importance of the occasion, either

an unavoidable sadness or a resistless sense of the ludicrous, a
sense of the tragic or of the comic.
But when the spirit dies, when the active falls into the
inert, when Life is swallowed up in Death, there results the
most perfect ugliness.
In the great whole of Nature we have all these vividly
presented to us amongst her details.
The latest researches of Science tend to represent all the
phenomena of Nature as the results of a struggle between the
moving forces of attraction or repulsion and the inertia resi
dent in matter itself. The consequent motions of the particles
of matter excite the various impressions in our minds. Na
ture is reduced to a duality ; an active principle, if we choose
so to name it, and a passive principle. We return, in fact, to
the volls and the űan of the Neoplatonists.
Now it is to be observed that, in Nature, the more we
discern the action of these energetic forces symbolised in
matter — the more delicate in fact the equilibrium in which
the material particles are held—the greater is the beauty
presented to us ; while, in proportion as the atoms lie in an
inert state, fettered by mutual friction, or even by the over
intensity of some one force, such as gravity; the more stable,
in short, the equilibrium, the more dull and uninteresting is
the result. If we take, for instance, a crystal of some salt
and pound it into a powdery mass, all the little particles of
the mass are no doubt exercising forces upon one another
whose tendency is, firstly to produce motion, and ultimately
to bind the whole into closer unity ; yet the particles do not
move, because the counteracting effects of friction, and the
 8

superabundant attraction of gravity are too strong for the

moving forces. But if now we dissolve this powder in water,
then it is in such a condition that the mutual attractions of
the particles can take effect, and the result is that the particles
aggregate into a definite shape — a crystal. There is no great
beauty in the comparatively inert mass of powder, but the
crystal is a definite exponent, as it were, of the forces that
have been acting, and its shape to some extent symbolises the
nature of those forces. The crystal is therefore an artistic
production. Again, consider a mass of soil ; in it the com
ponent matters are thrown together at random ; there they
remain, and the more formlessly they are arranged, the less
do they represent the action of any force, and the more dull
and flat does the whole appear. How different this from the
beautiful flower that springs from it ! All the little subtle
forces, provoked to action by placing the seed in the ground ,
have drawn, each in its proper place, the tiny particles from
the earth, building up the leaves, and the stalk, and the flower,
with its colours grouped in brighter array than Solomon .
Yet in the tissues of the plant exactly the same particles are
ranged as were formerly in the earth and air, but now their
various forces have found a sphere of action ; and the graceful
form of the leaves, and the delicate bend of the stalk, and the
quick, happy opening of the flower are now due to the mutual
balance of powers which were before imprisoned in the dull
dead ' earth. If we assume any unknown vital principle as
moulding the forms of leaf and tree, the argument is still the
same. The beauty arises in the gradual overcoming of the
unwillingness of matter to bend itself to the unseen forces.
However, to those who study Nature the unvarying physical
 9

laws seem marvellous enough ; and it is only because they

are more complicated in their action in the case of plants and
animals, that we seek refuge from the difficulty by supposing
them superseded by something else. The more complicated
they are, however, the more advanced is the beauty arising
from their action, and thus it happens that the beauty of the
human form is of a higher order than the beauty of shrub or
tree, just as the beauty of waving grass than that of the
crystal, or the beauty of the varying cloudlines than that of
the arched waterfall.
When we come to speak of the beauty of animals in general,
or of men, we must remember that if we believe they have any
wills at all of their own, then their bodies are not merely the
product of the forces of Nature, but are varied too by the
effect of the indwelling power of the will. Here then is an
element of imperfection due to the clash of these two powers.
And in man, at any rate, as a responsible creature, there arises
a conscious struggle for the mastery. Hence the defeat of
the will in man and his degradation to brute nature generally
presents us with the most complete impression of ugliness,
The human face may be very beautiful in its outlines as a
mere product of Nature ; but who does not know the beauty
added when its lines and curves have come at last to repre
sent the triumph of a true and manly heart ? And who does
not know how the most perfect features may be vilified and
distorted by a life of sensuality ?
The struggle between the will of man and the undevi
ating tread of Nature's forces is the highest subject of
pictorial and dramatic art ; and here, as everywhere, the
defeat or entanglement of the invisible powers in the more
 10

material gives rise to the tragic, or the ludicrous. When

the flower, which has so delicately built itself up, is touched
by the first breath of decay, the scale is turned against all
the invisible forces which held it together ; and though it
does not at once lose its beauty, yet that is then very dif
ferent from the beauty of the joyous bursting of the bud.
So no beauty in Art can be greater than that of the triumph
of man, surrounded by adversities, over all the evils of his
path : when he moulds trials, temptations, difficulties, and
dangers, physical or moral, all to his own will, instead of
falling a prey to them. Nor can anything be more tragic
than the crushing of his spirit beneath what seems an ad
verse fate, when bold resistance is overwhelmed by the relent
less powers of external Nature, or the endeavour to stand
against temptation foiled by the accumulated habits of many
years. On the other hand, this very adversity of fate, when
the occasion is one of little importance, transmutes the tragic
into the ludicrous . The incongruity of a noble ideal and
the wretched material fact is, at once, the source of all sad
ness and of all humour. Even Hamlet becomes ludicrous,
when his mother says ' He's fat and scant o breath,' and
it is almost impossible to help laughing even at one's own
misfortune when one's hat becomes a plaything for the wind
and mocks the most ardent pursuit. So it happens that the
misfortunes of others, because we consider them of little
importance, become the themes of laughter to ourselves ; and
the trite saying that there is but one step from the sublime
to the ridiculous is constantly exemplified. It is difficult to
say whether Shakespeare excelled most in tragedy or comedy.
Thomas Hood was full of the quickest humour and the
 II

deepest melancholy. Wordsworth has scarcely a tinge of un

avoidable sadness, perhaps no sense at all of the ridiculous.
If Mendelssohn or Mozart were kings of exuberant fancy
and happy expression, Beethoven, in his passionate sadness,
combined with an occasional touch of the most intense hu
mour, is for ever a type of a spirit struggling and striving
to express itself with materials for ever too gross to embody
the last splendour of that which it has conceived. So it is
not a sign perhaps of the highest artist mind when his works
are always expressive of the most complete satisfaction. If
it were possible that materials should thoroughly express
the glory that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, then it
would be different; but this is not possible, and therefore,
as we said before, there is always the sense, in true Art, of
something veiled, something unexpressed ; and the true artist
knows it and weeps it.
To return ; we said that there were three phases of the
contest between the invisible and the visible worlds. The
first, in which the former triumphs, and moulds all external
things to itself in perfectly happy expression ; the second,
in which the struggle is waged with doubtful issue, where
now one side seems to pull the balance down and now the
other ; and the third, in which the spirit lies dead, crushed
down to inaction by the very things that it hoped to have
inspired. And it will be seen that the domain of Art lies
practically in the second of these three phases. Here and
there, the artist may attain the heights of perfect felicity in
his work : that is the object for which he is always craving.
Here and there, he may give way to the third phase for
a moment in order to have a foil, as it were, for other
2
 12

parts of his work . But, in the great mass, the human artist
can only expect to range along the higher hopes of a doubt
ful warfare ; and it is indeed this fact which, as I shall try
to shew hereafter, makes human art of such importance to
us ; we feel more keenly its sympathy with the strivings of
which we are conscious in ourselves, for the very reason
that it is not always perfectly successful in its efforts — does
not lie in a range altogether above us.
Before proceeding further, however, I think it will be of
importance to insist on a distinction in Art which is often
not attended to, and the neglect of which often , in conse
quence, gives rise to much confusion .
If Art is, as we have hinted, the attempt to express, by
the analogy of outward things, certain undefined ideas of a
spiritual nature, it is, I think, evident that man in this en
deavour may proceed in two ways. He may either look on
the great artist- book of Nature, whether animate or inani
mate, and, by copying and studying parts of that, strive to
embody again ideas which he sees there depicted, by to
some extent reproducing Nature ; or he may, on the other
hand, fashion to himself new materials for his service, and,
making use of them, express himself in a way that Nature
never taught him or, at least, only distantly hinted to him.
The first of these methods is followed in dramatic art,
painting, sculpture, landscape gardening, and in any phase
of the other arts that is in any way imitative of Nature ;
the second, in music, architecture, dancing and the like.
Poetry may be said to belong to both classes ; its descrip
tions and vivid presentations to the mind of things we may
have seen and heard bring it under the first head ; its use of
 13

rhythm and metre is a direct not a pictorial artistic ex

pression, and belongs to the second class.
In thus making a distinction , it must always be borne
in mind that such distinctions are only roughly true ; paint
ing may allow the introduction of much art of the second
class, such as ornamental scroll-work , while music and archi
tecture may often contain artistic imitations of Nature. Also
I would say that, in calling the first class imitative, I do
not wish the word to be understood quite literally. It is
impossible to thoroughly imitate Nature, and if possible,
such an imitation would not make the work artistic. In

all pictorial art, if we choose so to name the first division,

the art consists in the choice, out of Nature's abundance,
of that which is most fitted to represent the artistic idea ,
and in the truthful combination of the materials so chosen .
Therefore, if it is intended, in a drama or a picture, to re
present such things as really have happened or exist, it is
not necessary or possible to introduce every detail, but the
artist endeavours to catch those only which are important
for his purpose ; and it is the triumph of the artistic mind
to be able to seize these quickly and truthfully. If, again ,
he wishes to take some scene not directly from Nature
but from the effort of his imagination, still he can only do
so artistically by combining together the treasures he has
stored up from a long study of Nature ; and if, in this com
bination, he produces anything impossible or untruthful, his
work is at once stamped as inartistic. A few lines seem to

place many of Shakespeare's characters before us as living

beings, and though they may never have existed, yet no
one can read his plays without feeling that they might have
2--2
 14

existed , and that as such they are most perfect studies of

Nature portrayed by a master-hand. Look closely at one
of Turner's pictures, and it will be evident that he has not
attempted to imitate Nature's multiplicity of detail ; yet the
few touches he has used have each carried their weight to
give with incomparable clearness that effect of Nature which
he desired to reproduce ? The poet, though he may carry
in his mind the clearest image of that which he is depict
ing, confines his art to the representation of a few particu
lars only, and on the truthfulness of this choice depends the
success of the production.
In all these cases the art consists in the embodiment of
ideas by the reproduction of images derived from Nature.
But when we turn to the other class of Art, which we may
call symbolic, the matter is different. For although, in the
case, for instance, of architecture, it is possible to say that
the thought of piling stones on one another was suggested by
the wonderful forms of rock and crag , or the indefinite inter
lacing of arches by the embrace of lofty trees ; yet it is clear
that there is nothing in Nature like a cathedral, nor any
thing in wood or mountain which it was designed to be a
representation of. So we may say that the effects of music
are hinted at in the songs of birds or the deep rolling of the
torrents ; but we cannot really doubt that, in the cadences of
his voice, and in the concerted music of his orchestras, man
uses a form of expression entirely his own and as independent

1 It must not be thought that there is no beauty in the fulness of Nature's

detail, and that this can be safely omitted without losing anything of the whole.
This is not true ; but, since it is impossible to represent the whole, it has been
customary to omit this detail. Pre-raphaelitism was a protest against this custom .
 15

of Nature as anything can be. In poetry, as we said before,

there is a rhythm and a metre which belong to the symbolic
class. For if such rhythm is sometimes used to imitate an
actual effect of Nature, as in Southey's Lodore, yet this is
not its legitimate province, but rather it is an instrument
solely of the poet's own creating, whereby he gives force to
his artistic ideas, while his words picture forth the same idea
by the means of images gathered from the world around.
It may seem forced to some to insist on this distinction
between pictorial or descriptive art and that which is more
directly constructive or symbolical ; but the distinction is
of some importance, and many have recognised it so far as
to refuse any possible similarity of nature or design to paint
ing and music, and to deny all unity to the different branches
of Art. In truth, however, the struggle which I have spoken
of as the groundwork of Art underlies everything we see,
whether it be in the building up of matter throughout ex
ternal Nature by the action of intangible forces, or whether
it be in the struggle with that Nature again which takes
place when the human will comes in contact with it ; and
beauty arises whenever the more spiritual succeeds in mould
ing the more material to itself, whether it be, as we noticed
before, in the gradual rearing up of a graceful tree from the
inert earth, or whether it be in the triumph of the spiritual
will in man over the sensual tendencies of his earthly nature .
Therefore, as we recognise its own peculiar beauty in every
scene of Nature, so wherever man too succeeds in moulding
things successfully to his higher ideas we may justly call
his efforts artistic ; whether it be in dress, or in language,
or in the carriage of his body, or handwriting, or tone of the
 16

voice — the successful cultivation of each of these is an art,

and impresses us more or less with a sense of beauty. The
difference, of which I have spoken, between what may be
called pictorial art and that which we have called symbolic,
That is to say , the former
lies rather in the form of the art.
has been developed more directly through an imitation of
the scenes which Nature presents and of the materials which
she uses, while the latter is more due to man's constructive
originality, which enables him to use new materials with a
power of combination entirely his own . Thus it happens
that, to a certain small extent, the former may be more ac
quired by study than the latter. In painting, for instance,
a person who has a mind capable of seizing and appreciating
the important points of a scene may by careful study and
use of his materials become a very fair artist, even without
any special gift towards form or colour ; but in music it is
notorious that a man may have the finest appreciative faculty
and even the most brilliant imaginative power, and yet, if
he be destitute of the natural ear which ought, unconsciously
almost, to give body to his thoughts, he will never be able
to attain the essential freedom of expression . So real grace
of action or of oratory is not altogether attainable by study,
it must to a certain extent be inborn. Of course in all these
latter forms of Art, such as music, architecture, oratory , men
may study from one another, as painters from Nature ; but
it is clear that this study alone, even combined with the most
appreciative powers, can never produce Art of a really high
order.
This difference in form being allowed, there is really the
closest unity of nature in all Art. For though, at first sight,
 17

it might appear that there could be no resemblance in the

ideas conveyed by a beautiful painting and a four- part song,
or in the manner of expression in each ; yet, the more closely
we consider them, the more we shall see that, in fact, the
very same principles and modes of treatment do prevail
in both.
If we go back to Nature as our primal teacher, we shall
find that she never acts, in the most minute matter, without
following out certain ideas or principles, which we call the
Laws of Nature, and which are indeed the modes according
to which, as far as we are concerned, the Author of Nature
has chosen to express His will. Nor can we doubt that these
laws are indeed very closely connected with Him. They
are not mere arbitrary rules serving to give rise to a casual
world , or to be replaced by a new set when this world is
worn out ; but really , if there is any truth in Him who made
them , they are the eternal expressions to us of a perfection
that as yet we are only dreaming of. And surely we are justi
fied in deducing this à priori, for does it not acquire redoubled
force when we discover what are these principles of Nature's
action ?—when we see her, first of all, stretching arms of
endless might throughout all creation , holding and en
veloping everything with unceasing force, through the wonder
ful grasp of suns or the inconceivably minute inclination of
the tiny atoms to one another — and then , on the other hand ,
when we see her keeping all that mighty power in check
as she moves on submissively within her own fixed bounds
in perfect moderation , wreathing the light halo round the
delicate firefly with the same fingers as she spreads the
morning upon the mountains and the thundercloud along the
 18

valley — and when we see her, by the light of science , re

maining permanent and indestructible through all the years,
and yet, from moment to moment of time, shaking herself
out and out with endless variety of change — when we see
every little plant and animal fulfilling itself in happy in
dividuality, and, at the same instant, bound by the strongest
links of sympathetic dependence on every other part of
creation, all things different yet all things for ever knit to
gether fast and close - do we not feel that all these princi
ples, purely scientific as they are, are also consonant with
what we know of our highest conceptions ? Do they not
speak to us of a Will, embracing everything, which shall
endure when all that seems shall suffer shock '--a Will all
powerful, yet not capricious, whose mode of operation is
is itself Reason, fixed, inviolable ?-of a creative Intelligence
of unchanging essence, for ever assuming new and newer
phases through all time ? of a Heart, strong in its own person
ality to live and to act, and yet filled with the fulness of all
love and sympathy ?
If we take these, and all other laws discoverable in
Nature, as indicative of Divine perfection, I think it becomes
evident that it is the sphere of all Art, of whatever kind, to
embody some or all of these laws or ideas ? in its works.
And here we shall find the real affinity of all forms of Art.
The artist, whatever materials he uses, must, either con
sciously or unconsciously, mould them to obey these laws.
When he takes his art from Nature he copies Nature so as
to give force and expression to certain of them which he
1 “ That which, contemplated objectively, we call a Law ; the same, contem
plated subjectively, is an Idea .” — Coleridge, On Church and State.
 19

perceives there ; and those details which are not of import

ance for this purpose he may omit. When he moulds his
materials for himself, as in architecture or music, he must
still mould them to express these ideas, otherwise his work
is not artistic. I do not for a moment mean to say that
every musician or architect has consciously endeavoured to
represent any such ideas ; but, in casting about to discover
how to convey truthfully what was in him, he has of necessity
shapen to himself a mode of expression in which their pre
sence is traceable.
It is impossible within the limits of the present essay to
trace the embodiment of all these laws of Nature in the
different branches of Art ; and, besides, science as yet has
only brought us to the threshold of Nature's storehouse, and
therefore we are still ignorant of the vast variety of her
action, and the fulness of meaning of the principles according
to which she acts. It may be sufficient, however, to take one
of these principles, the Law of Continuity, which has been so
remarkably expanded by the later researches of science ; and
with it the complementary law , the Law of Variety. To take
the latter first ; throughout all external Nature there is no
sameness, no monotony ; no two successive events are exactly
the same, no two objects have exactly the same qualities,
whether they be two undulations of light or whether they be
two offspring of the same parents ; this principle is of im
mense importance in science, as in the theory of the Variation
of Species, for instance. But the principle of continuity is even
more so ; it tells us that through all this variety runs a perfect
oneness of nature, linking all things together with the ties
of a common brotherhood. The physical phenomena of the
 20

external world, sound, light, heat, electricity, have a common

origin ; they may really be looked upon as what the botanist
or zoologist would call varieties of the same species ; while
in botany and zoology again this blending of species is un
failingly present. Moss and fern, fish and reptile, even
animal and vegetable ; who can draw the line between them ?
a kindred nature seems to envelop every form of life.
Now let us turn to Art ; and take that of the simplest
kind, the expression of beauty in form merely. Both these
laws must be present together. The straight line is con
tinuous, but it is certainly monotonous, and therefore perhaps
the least beautiful of all lines. The circle is better, there
is a change of direction, but a want of variety about that
change ; the line keeps on bending always at the same rate ;
an ellipse or oval is more beautiful, and curves, such as the
parabola or hyperbola, which may suggest infinite possibilities
of change, best of all. On the other hand, a broken line,
or a curve which suddenly changes its direction, are not
beautiful; and it is to be remarked that such curves do
absolutely not occur in Nature ; though many lines do ap
proach the case so nearly as to suggest discontinuity, and with
it to suggest a painful sense of incompleteness. With colouring,
again, the importance of these principles should never be
overlooked ; a monotonous shade of colour is not known in
Nature and ought not to be in Art ; on the other hand, dis
continuity of colouring is equally faulty ; every colour modi
fies the adjacent colours by throwing over them a tinge of
its complementary colour, and that not suddenly but by
infinitely delicate gradations, and to disregard this is as
wanting to Art as it is untrue to Nature. If we turn to art
 21

in sound, though the material is different, we may trace these

same principles (amongst others) with as much certainty as
before. There is no melody, for instance, in the repetition
of the same sound without variety ; more beauty is found
in a chromatic scale proceeding by semitones ; but here there
is a monotony in the intervals, and the diatonic scale is more
pleasing. Introduce varieties in time (subject, of course, to
other laws, such as that of order, which may here come in)
and the effect is better, and, as a general rule, the more com
plete the variety introduced, in the tones of the notes, in the
intervals of sound between them, in the intervals of time
between them, the more complete is the impression ; pro
vided always this variety be introduced subject to an in
ternal continuity. The continuity of two sounds is perhaps
greatest, that is, there is the least real change produced in
the movement of the conveying air or the receiving ear, not
when they are nearest together on the keyboard of a piano,
or the page of music, but when they are related by some
simple interval, such as an octave or a fifth or fourth . This
is sufficiently shewn by the difficulty sometimes found in
making a large pipe sound its proper bass note ; it will
glide off into the octave above on the smallest provocation.
The next approach to continuity is obtained in the delicate
gradation from one note to another through the intermediate
sounds, as when a violinist slides his finger along the string
from one position to another. According with this, we find
that the ruder forms of melody, as the jödeling of the Swiss,
incline more to the use of harmonic intervals, thirds, fifths,
and octaves ; while modern music has shewn a great ten
dency towards chromatic modulation. But in every beautiful
 22

air, that perfect continuity of sound is always one of the

most remarkable features. It is worth the trouble to take

some well-known melody which commends itself for its

beauty, and to examine it with respect to these two principles
only. The continuity will be shewn not only in the absence
of abrupt successions of notes, but also in the absence of
abrupt changes of style or time, and in the continuance of
the sametheme or idea throughout the whole. On the other
hand, it will be found that the same notes or intervals never
recur monotonously, the theme is never treated twice in
exactly the same way ; if the air is ascending in one part,
it descends again in another, if the time is quickened in one
part, it is lengthened out in another, and so on. All the
pleasure of an air with variations is due to this principle of
continuance under variety of form .
So we might take the principle of power associated with
perfect moderation, or of complete individuality in every part
associated with sympathetic harmony throughout, or whatever
other principle Nature affords, and so trace their importance
in every branch of Art. But, for our purpose here, it is suf
ficient to allow that, in respect of all these ideas, all branches
of Art, whatever be their origin, are one ; and thus the ques
tion before us will be very much simplified, and, by allowing
this unity of Art, we shall be able to avoid the mistake of
giving undue preference to any branch to which we may
be naturally inclined, and shall be ready, if we perceive
any one particular advantage to spring from one branch of
Art, to allow the possibility of its accruing too from other
branches.
 CHAPTER II .

THE more then we believe that Art is the expression, more

or less complete, of something inward and invisible, the less
can we doubt its influence on the spiritual nature of man.
And, in fact, men do not doubt its influence ; nothing is more
common than to say that the study of Art refines mankind,
and I think it is evident that the effort to mould outward
things to one's inward nature, or the constant sight of that
effort by those who live in the presence of artistic works, must
at last, for good or ill, have a very permanent effect. This
has been very beautifully expressed by Wordsworth in his
well-known description of Lucy and the effect produced on
her by constant contact with the beauties of Nature :
.hers shall be the breathing balm ,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her ; for her the willow bend ;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form
By silent sympathy.

That which we cannot study so easily in individual cases,

we may study with considerable certainty in large bodies of
 24

men. How evident is the close connection of national Art

with national character and national religion ! If we turn to
Egypt, that ever-wonderful birthplace of human Art and
Science, how striking is the connection between their strange
forms of the redeeming Osiris and his destroying brother Set,
of the snake-like Apep or the wonderful Isis of a myriad
names, and the highly mystical religion of their priestly
philosophers ! How clearly do their colossal figures, their
temples built with enormous blocks of stone, their vast Pyra
mids, all speak of a people crushed down with a sense of
oppression, suffocated by the sight of these immutable works
of art, or these staring monstrosities, to a terrible degradation !
Never was a philosophic caste more learned, never was a
people more wanting in all spirit and all originality than in
Egypt. Does not the glittering mosque of the Mahometan
with its thousand steepled minarets suggest the strange fasci
nation of destiny which makes a fatalist out of the gay and
sensuous Moor or even of the grave Arab ? The dark rock
hewn sanctuaries of India, or the long vista of temple
chambers ending in a blackness only broken by the restless
eye of the sacred hawk in Egypt or the glitter of the golden
cherubim in Jerusalem, speak of religions whose first and
fundamental thought was the mysterious and unapproachable
sanctity of the Most High ; and no one can doubt that they
did diffuse this thought among the beholders, filling them
with an awe which might well suggest the words, The fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom . How quickly does
the Corinthian style of architecture suggest a many- sided
cultivation, refined, yet luxurious and unaspiring, such as
belonged to the days when the Grecian glory had been
 25

tarnished by contact with Asia ; or how certainly we read the

simple beauty of the hardy Dorian or the stern massiveness
of the Roman character in the works of their hands ! And
what a change from all this to the Gothic ! nothing ever
before expressed in such beautiful language the aspiration of
an upward-looking heart. The hope of immortality, which
lay silent, at least, and hid in every national religion before,
has here blossomed in stone in every line and column ; and
the chaste unworldliness of that hope was plainly enough
written in the pure grey stone and subdued colouring which
now in an age of ‘ restoration ' is often indeed in danger of
defacement by masses of gaudy gilt and paint.
In music again, although we do not know much of its
nature among ancient peoples, how easy it is among moderns
to trace, for instance, the cheerful sociability of the Germans
in their Mozart, or their mystical tendencies in their Beethoven
or Schumann, or both combined in Bach ; to hear the light
originality of the French in their Offenbach ; or the straight
forward energy and somewhat formal greatness of the English
character in their adopted Handel. The contrast of the
intense formality of thought belonging to the end of the 17th
century and the spiritual tendency of the early part of the
19th is as strongly marked between the works of Buononcini
and Mendelssohn as between the thoughts of Dryden and
Shelley.
The cultivation of Art, whether among individuals or
nations, has this virtue at least, that it not only shews them
to possess capabilities a little beyond the sphere of everyday
life, but it also shews that they have a source of pleasure, and
therefore a motive for action, very different from the gross
 26

pleasures which man has in common with the brutes. Thus,

in its merely negative aspect, the love of Art and its cultiva
tion may do very much by winning away the mind from the
pursuit of those animal indulgences which must at last stamp
it with the seal of degradation. In this way, as I hinted
before, Art becomes a stepping-stone towards Religion. No
thing is more commonly seen than the wish to cultivate Art,
among men who, having spent years in the absorbing pursuit
of money , look restlessly round at last for some more refined
pleasure which shall satisfy the want in their minds, when
mere wealth has lost its charm. Then they spend their
riches in buying celebrated pictures, or filling their houses
with frequent concerts and musical entertainments, not per
haps so much because they really enjoy works of firstrate
art as because they feel that here, at any rate, there is some
thing which is worth cultivating and which will in its turn
hold them, as others, with a charm of which they were ignorant
before.
As the love of Art and of all that is beautiful grows
stronger and stronger in man, the more certain does its power
become. The more distasteful to him become the pleasures
he delighted in before, the more hateful to him become all
kinds of deformity; and herein consists its refining influence.
For since, in the world, evil is so often associated with ugli
ness, and indeed, if we could see aright, always so, it thus
happens that the love of beauty makes men shrink more and
more from the very sight or contact of physical or moral
evil ; it tends to make them live more and more apart from
the world, from its sickening strife, from its harsh blindness,
and from its ' hollow greetings where no kindness is ; ' and it
 27

leads them to seek an inner life of ideal beauty where the

sights and sounds of the noisy world shall be once and for
all shut out. In this very power lies at once the danger and
the virtue of the study of Art. No one, who has known any
thing of the lives of poets or painters or musicians, can
doubt that it makes men shrink away, almost with terror,
from the struggle of outer life. The susceptibilities and
keener feelings which Art educes, and which do necessarily
belong to a higher civilisation, make us at the same time so
much more liable to be wounded by the thorns of a rude
world. As a man, turning his back now on the civilisation
of the England of to-day, and setting his foot through all the
centuries back again to the barbarous life of the early Britons,
would shrink from mixing with them and their rude habits
and would at last perhaps sink into a moody loneliness ; so the
true artist mind that has leaped many years beyond his race,
with the dower of deeper thoughts and quicker sympathies
belonging to a new age, feels himself ajar with the insensate
criticism or the blind sensuality of his time, and is in danger
himself too of flying from the forms of misery which meet
him in crowded cities, of crimes which deface the fair seeming
of village and hamlet, and the narrow-minded pride which
runs its thread through the most educated even or religious
society. So, one after another, how often has it happened
that the Dante, or the Turner, or the Beethoven of his time
has exiled himself or been exiled from the world, with the one
complaint on his lips, so beautifully expressed by Shelley :
O plead
With famine or wind -walking pestilence,
Blind lightning , or the deaf sea, not with man !
Cruel, cold, formal man ; righteous in words ,
In deeds a Cain .

3
 28

Here then the question arises which is indeed the very

gist of the question immediately before us. Does Art offer
any incentive to positive life and action ? does it afford any
counteracting influence to that spirit of cowardly inaction and
retreat which is the curse of quick and delicate sensibilities ? I
think it is clear that Art, properly studied, does offer such an
incentive. True Art, if it draws more sharply for us the distinc
tion between the beautiful and the hateful, is constantly
presenting us with the struggle between the active powers on
the one side and the heavy, inactive tendencies on the other,
and raising in our minds a constant hope on the side of the
spiritual and a constant joy in its triumph. By virtue of its
relation to the whole spirit of Nature, it brings us into closer
contact with the very • life of things,' and so seems to urge us
on to a freer life and nobler expression of our higher thoughts
and aspirations. If the grandeur and majesty of some beauti
ful cathedral, where the restless murmurs of the outer world
are caught, as in a delicate ocean shell, but never avail to dis
turb its solemn peacefulness or to mar the deep rolling of its
organ tones—if that majesty tend to fill us with a contempt of
all the petty affairs of life; or if the beautiful outlines of its
tall, fluted columns, lost in the dim height of the roof, seem to
carry us away with hidden desires, unfitting us for the common
round of everyday work ; is it not also true, that all these
things awake in us, if we look upon them aright, a real long
ing to tune our lives into harmony with them ; to make every
act of ours, like the stones in the cathedral, each in its place
contribute to the grandeur of a whole life; and every day to
point upwards and upwards with its fellows towards a shadow
ed hope that waits us far above ? If some great Madonna
 29

picture hanging there, with joyous face burdened with the

message of overflowing love, seem at first sight to have the
effect of making the sight of sinful men and women ha ful to

us ; is it not much more its rightful effect to cast over them

the veil of its loving presence and invest all mankind with
the halo of its own brightness, and to awake a wish in each
beholder to make himself also worthy of the goodness which
he sees there depicted ? I do not think we can doubt that
Art, ifproperly studied, has this incentive effect. Yet it might
be exceedingly difficult to prove this from cases of well-known
individuals or from the history of nations, on account of the
intangible nature of the point at issue. There are cases, how
ever, of men like Mendelssohn, of sterling goodness, whose
goodness was yet so associated with their art, that we can
hardly help believing that one of the strongest motives to the
blamelessness of their lives was the' wish to be worthy of that
beauty that had taken their souls captive with an irresistible
attraction. And I think it cannot be denied that there is,
among the Roman Catholics, or amongst those of the Angli
can Church who make most use of the impressions produced
by music and painting and architecture, a readiness and
energy of well-doing and a veneration, often wanting amongst
those who discard all such aids.
It appears to me certain that man's relation to Art in any
shape ought always to imply two processes, the receptive and
the creative. In those men whom we call artists it is evident
ly so. They receive the idea first, either from Nature or
from the workings of their own imagination, in what may be
called a perfectly passive state ; for indeed that wonderful
working of the imagination has little to do with a man's own
3-2
 30

will, but he looks on, as from without, waiting silently for

what it may bring to him. Then, after that, they set to
work — and it must always be remembered that it is real
work and not a mere pastime—to express themselves in lan
guage which will convey to others all the beauty they have
seen . And the case is not different with those other men
who receive the message of Art, but are not by the world
called artists. If they are to study Art to any purpose, they
must become artists too ; they cannot be content with mere
receiving, they must be up and doing also. And there is
none so weak but that he may find one means of expression.
Pen or pencil may fail, the ear for sound or the eye for colour
may be blunt, but everyone may try to realise in his own
actions something of that sense of beauty, which is ever
restless within him till it has found an outlet. In this sense
everyone may be an artist ; nay, in this sense everyone must
be an artist, or his love of Art will fade into a mere sensual
pleasure, and his power of rendering become a piece of me
chanical trickery. For this sense of the word Art is not
a forced one ; the highest and truest Art of all is in a man's
own life; where his will, deriving its inspiration from above,
comes into the field with all the crowded passions and the
blind instincts and affections which, for good or evil, are the
last outcome of the material nature that man shares with the
lowest animals ; where it draws some to its side, making them
its servants for good ; shakes itself free from the clinging
grasp of others, and seeks to develop all together into a har
monious whole, crowned with order and might. Here is a
struggle, and here may be a spiritual triumph, which may well
seem to be the type of all other arts, and here is a moral beauty
 31

round which all the other beauty in Nature and Art seems
to wreathe itself as round the very source of its brightness.
No one can continue to hear or feel the beauty of Art
who does not listen to her words, and that not with a vain,
dilettante languor, but with the steady effort to fully realise
them, and to lead a life worthy of her message. This is the
case with everything else. As Butler remarks in his Analogy,
some impressions, when constantly repeated, seem at last to
wear out and fade away till we are no longer conscious of
them. Others again grow and grow upon us with a tremen
dous power. And the difference will always be found to
depend on this, that in the second case the impression has
borne fruit in action, in the first it has not. Many instances
of this will occur to everyone; such, for instance, as the readi
ness with which a man will learn to sleep through any amount
of unimportant noise, while he will hear with extraordinary
quickness any the slightest sound at which he is accustomed
to rouse himself.

The evil of cultivating a study of Art which bears no fruit

in action is that we thus lose one of the best and strongest
motives to good ; and, by degrading the love of beauty,
degrade ourselves too at the same time. With Art this degra
dation is unhappily possible to a great degree without any
immediate consciousness on our part; for this reason, that the
laws of beauty in Art being, as we have seen, the most com
plete development of the physical laws of Nature, and our
bodies being perhaps the highest products of the working of
those laws, it comes to pass that things which are consonant
with the development of all those laws are beneficial to our
bodies, and therefore also agreeable to our senses. Hence
 32

Art carries with it a pleasure purely sensuous, as is quite

evident, whether in the quick, stimulating changes of music,
or in the healthy air and pleasing variety of the scenes of
Nature. Nor do I wish to inveigh against the indulgence of
this sensual enjoyment, I think its existence only serves to
shew how difficult or impossible it is to draw any marked
dividing line between our higher nature and our more animal
instincts. But I think this sensual side, so to speak, to all
Art does make it possible for men to go on pursuing it with
pleasure under the impression that they are aiming at its
highest beauty, when they are really losing themselves by
degrees in the degradation of a simply mechanical and mean
ingless pastime. It is a warning to us, in all our pursuits or
employments, never to lose their best and truest worth by
mistaking the value of the letter and the spirit. How often
does the study of flowers, for instance, degenerate into a mere
childish scrambling after everything new, with little regard
for the relative value of the new discovery, and none for its
beauty, except in so far as it be a rarity or a monstrosity !
And so with other sciences. But in the pursuit of Art, I
would almost say that it is the rule ; the beauty of every
composition is lost in the anxiety to criticise, with becoming
skill, some new variety of detail. An unexpected succession
of chords, a new way of putting on the colours, or a curious
effect produced, anything that being novel is not of vital
importance, is sufficient to send the art-critic into a discourse
in which all appreciation of the spirit of the composition is
forgotten.
If this is one danger of Art, that other of its gradual
degradation to a sensational mockery, though not perhaps
 33

quite so common in our country and time, is still equally

important. If we look back at the ancient civilisations , we
can see how often this very thing became the stumblingblock
over which they fell. At Athens perhaps especially does
this force itself upon us. No nation started with such an
intense veneration for the beautiful, moral and physical, and
with such high artistic capabilities as the Greeks, and as long
as they preserved the vigour and purity of that feeling by
a career of noble action, they produced some of the greatest
spirits and the finest artistic works of the world ; but when
after their contact with Asia they began to decline, it was
because that high sense had degraded itself into a handmaid
to luxury, and so the true Art left them, or rather, in fact,
they deserted it.
It is not at all difficult to see the presence of this evil in
modern society. How many there are who, starting with real
capabilities for the appreciation of Art, stultify their whole
lives by a' craving after the sensual excitement it affords
them ! Music loses its charm unless it is made to startle the
ear by a succession of false effects or by passages of glittering
execution. Paintings must be daubed with dull flats of
glaring colour. The drama, the opera, romance, all are
voted uninteresting unless they embody the weakest sensation
art. Anything for a new excitement, nothing for a true
thought so expressed as to place the artist and his audience
in perfect accord. This is all easy enough to understand.
All art has, and ought to have, a power of excitement in it ;
but the excitement so produced is not meant to evaporate
away into thin air. If persons who delight in ‘sensation of
every kind had accustomed themselves from the beginning,
 34

whenever it excited any higher feeling or impulse within them,

to act up to that feeling or impulse, their art would now be a
very different thing from what it is ; but, in fact, each delay
deadens the receptivity for excitement, and then new and
newer phases must be sought. Whatever it is, whether
reading poetry, or hearing sermons, or going to the opera, or
indulgence in dram - drinking, everything which produces a
false excitement, that is, an excitement which does not bear
fruit in action, is poisonous to body and soul of man.
It is this very thing which is the bane of women's educa
tion of the present day. Their sensibility or receptiveness is
now , as a rule, so great in proportion to their capability of
action, that it completely outgrows the latter, and having then
no support falls into a miserable ruin ; and this in conse
quence not only of a complicated state of civilisation, but
also of a training which dwarfs all power of action, all tendency
to originality. A girl may use up her paints and ' do ' trees
and mountains after the copies of her master, in the con
ventional style ; but to study from Nature or to produce a
style of her own with real hard work is thought unnecessary
and perhaps unfeminine; and, supposing she has no special
faculty in art, with the very few other outlets for women's
action that there are, it cannot be wondered at that the
habit of feeling without acting becomes at last so familiar to
her. Women are often apparently more cruel than men, not
because they are not naturally more sensitive, but because they
are not accustomed to realise their feelings in action ; and so
they say and do things with little consideration for the hard
ships or the labour they may thus impose on others.
On the other hand, if men strive to realise their art in true
 35

work, its influence on them becomes immense. Each contact

with it renders their receptive powers more delicate instead of
more gross. To such people the excitements which are the
indulgence of the infatuated become absolutely painful, and
they shrink from the noisy music and the thrilling novels
and the grotesquely hideous dramas which please the unim
pressionable minds of the crowd. Gradually to them Nature
and Art unfold a glory which is for ever hid from those who
do not seek ; beauties which lie concealed in the most unpre
tending productions of the great masters; pearls which are
trampled upon by the ignorant; the splendour of Nature
showered down through leaf and tree and fleecy cloud, with a
wealth of beauty which fills them with untold delight.
From all this it seems to me indisputable that Art does
awake in the thoughtful observer a very strong desire for
accordant action. Goethe asks in one of his smaller poems *
what profit there is in Nature or Art if it do not awake a
creative power in the soul, and teach it to find expression
through the fingers.
It is this incentive power in Art, then, which makes it
possible for it to be of service to Religion . For though, in
virtue of its refining power, it might exalt and intensify our
spiritual thoughts, yet, if it were only destined to awake them
to a short life unfruitful of action, it could only be of service
to a sickly and barren religion, condemned like itself to
wither away in the rays of the morning sun. If we agree to
what has been said, we may well believe that Art has really a
very high office to fulfil. All her worthiness springs from a
ground akin to that of the deepest religion. True Art is a
*
Monolog des Liebhabers.
 36

sort of unconscious piety, springing from a veneration and

delight in the Divine glory, without any distinct reference to
personal relation, or even without conscious knowledge of the
nature of that it delights in. Thus it may, naturally enough,
form a real support to a personal religion. Carlyle says :
' Art also and Literature are intimately blended with Re
ligion ; as it were, outworks and abutments by which that
highest pinnacle in our inward world gradually connects
itself with the general level and becomes accessible there
from .' Farther on he writes of ' that unspeakable Beauty
which in its highest clearness is Religion, is the inspiration of
a Prophet, yet in some degree must inspire every singer were
his theme never so humble.'
Lecky, in his History of Morals, has very ingeniously
remarked that there are two kinds of religion. First, that
in which the mass of conscious motive powers and affections
is disinclined to good and is only kept in train by the almost
painful effort of a strong will, following the promptings
of the most spiritual conscience or reason. The other,
that in which the preponderance of the conscious motives
is on the side of good, and where, consequently, the person
follows the good joyfully and without constraint or forced
effort. As a rule, I think this distinction is that between
man's religion and woman's religion, the religion of duty
and aspiration and the religion of love. But however this
may be, I think it will be interesting to inquire what is
the influence of Art on each phase.
It is clear that on the latter kind of religion the power
of Art must be very great. The sensitiveness of feeling
cultivated by Art brings before us so many motives to good,
 37

to kindness, to generosity, to modesty, that it produces a

habit, so to speak, of good feeling ; and, if obeyed, of good
action also. At the same time, as we hinted before, it
brings forward many motives to inaction ; the very sensitive
ness of feeling, which it produces, urges us to fly from the
haunts of misery and evil ; the distaste of that which is hide
ous, the longing after that which is beautiful, make the task
of facing sin and its offspring in their very stronghold all
the more harassing and difficult. He whose mind is culti
vated with the delight in all that is refined and lovely, not
only feels positive pain in meeting with and combating the
defects of the world, but also in order to do so must give
up much of the joy which for the time he might experi
ence in other scenes. This is the burden of the blessing of
the artist's nature. Quicker sensibilities to good and lovely,
quicker shrinking from sin and death. He who sees most,
sacrifices most when he descends into the arena to struggle
with evil; for it must be remembered that he must, in a
certain sense, descend. He must be willing, in order to raise
other men, to lay aside his higher thoughts and feelings so
that he may sympathise thoroughly and truly with them
and put himself in their position. He must be willing to
be misunderstood and calumniated and scoffed at, to be hated
and ridiculed by turns ; and he must be content to leave
his highest work unappreciated and unfinished, in the hope
that it may bring forth fruit in its time. The cultivation
of Art does, in fact, like all true cultivation, give rise to a
fuller life in every way ; in multiplying the possibilities of
happiness it multiplies the possibilities bf grief ; in other
words, it, as all civilisation does, increases the manifold
 38

relations of man, and raises him from the dull monotonous

existence of the peasant who drives the team to the quick
full life of the educated man who finds interest and excite
ment and sorrow and delight in a thousand things about
his path. The blind need not therefore be unduly envious
of the seeing ; if he is unconscious of many of the joys of
the latter, he is also free from many of his sorrows and
responsibilities. He who has seen the light must go forth,
his face beaming like that of Moses, to give light to others ;
to shine in the darkness, though the darkness comprehend
it not. He must stand alone, his office to fold his sym
pathy about others, to reap sympathy from none. Every
great man who has hewn out one step for the world, has
laid his body to level the road or to be a stepping-stone
for future generations, has saved mankind only through the
depth of his own solitude. He, the Master -Christ, who
looked through all his nation and time and saw but misery
cankered with sin, may well have prayed that the cup might
pass from him, for his nature was sensitive beyond what
we dream ; yet he too shrank not from that terrible soli
tude of his whole life, but was content, according to the
eternal law , to sacrifice himself, while he descended to the
weakness of men in order to draw all men after him.
But if those who possess not the cultivation of Art need
not envy those who have to steer their way through com
plications arising from this very cultivation, it is none the
less true that they cannot escape them ultimately. Through
all creation, the same unfailing tendency which spreads the
arms of the sea -polyp out and out into newer forms and
refines and builds up the lowest creatures onwards and on
 39

wards towards the most complicated—that same tendency

inevitably, as one should hope, gives birth some time or
other, in every human mind, to the appreciation of something
which has a beauty beyond the sensual, the appreciation,
that is, in however small degree, of the beautiful in Art ;
and therewith a new delight arises that involves a new respon
sibility, and upon the working out of that responsibility de
pends the continuance of that delight and the growth of Art
into a true servant of real religion, or the degradation of
that delight again to the dust and ashes of a mere sensu
ality and the weakening of the spirit of man by an un
balanced refinement which makes his last state worse than
his first.
So much for the study of Art in general on a religion
springing from a naturally good and impulsive heart. But,
as I said before, we may also recognise a religion which,
for the sake of simplicity, we put in another class ; that in
which the temptations of sensual motives are very strongly
felt, but are conquered by the force of a will whose voli
tions spring from a severe sense of duty (for I must recog
nise the existence of a sense of this kind, differing from
ordinary actuating principles or motives in that, by its very
nature, the calculation of profit or pleasure is precluded).
In this case the motive forces to action are more compli
cated, and a greater struggle is carried on. And here the

influence of Art seems to come in, for since it is always

presenting us with the strife between the more spiritual and
the more material forces and, through the sense of beauty,
enlisting our sympathies in the triumph of the former, it
does no doubt, even though unconsciously, reinforce by its
 40

presence the spiritual will within us to clearer action. But,

besides this positive influence, it has also a more negative
power ; I mean that it takes away the keenness and edge
from many of our more sensual motives and thus gives to
the will more chance of victory. In many cases, as we
noticed before, pleasures of a sensual or violently exciting
tendency become extremely distasteful through the cultiva
tion of Art, or at any rate the interest in them is lost ; and
in each of such cases so many foes of our higher nature
are disarmed . For instance, the refining art may bring be
fore us inclinations to good which we should not otherwise
have ; it may make a man more inclined to treat his horse
kindly, or even to put himself to considerable trouble in
order to save it from injury or pain. Or, on the other hand,
it may be of service to a sense of duty by weakening op
posing motives, as in the case of a person who should think
it inconsistent with his duty to go to a prize- fight ; and
who, taking great delight in it at first, should afterwards, by
the cultivation of true Art, come to feel a distaste for the
want of refinement or the cruelty and false excitement that
he would meet with there.
In each of these cases Art would be likely to make action
on the side of right more habitual. But Schiller, in his
Essay on the Moral Use of Æsthetics, only allows that Art
furthers morality in those cases, like the latter, in which it
gives assistance, as it were, to the moral will, but does not
supersede it. In the other cases, where Art supplies a mo
tive of itself and the feeling of duty does not come into
play, he maintains that morality is not concerned and the
case ceases to be a point in question. He gives the in
 41

stance of a prisoner who was tempted, when his guard had

fallen asleep, oppressed by the heat of the day, to kill him
and so escape ; but was withheld from his murderous intent,
not by the firmness of a moral will, but by the strong sense
of beauty which urged him not to commit so dishonourable
and hateful an act . Here, Schiller remarks, the resulting
action was only determined by the balance of pain and plea
sure within the man, and no credit can possibly be due to
it as good or bad. On the other hand, where the motive
of Art is only ancillary to the effort of the will acting under
the conviction of duty, the action still remains within the
bounds of morality, and Art may be clearly accounted as
of service in promoting the momentary victory of the will,
as well as in securing its habitual ascendancy.
I do not wish to enter into a discussion which has evi
dently no limits. But I think it is certainly not necessary
to confine the importance of Art to the latter case. Good
habits are of so much importance that it is well to cultivate
them, even when our resulting actions are not consciously
prompted by feelings of moral obligation ; and besides , the
feeling of duty is perhaps after all not so much a distinct
sense within us, which throws its light on some of our actions
and at other times withholds it, as a pervading consciousness
(whose source is hid from us) that some motives, some pains
and pleasures , are of a higher class than others, and demand
our more unquestioning and uncalculating obedience ; so that
this sense is urging us always, through every moment of our
lives, step by step to cease from following the more sensual
and to incline ever to the more far-reaching and spiritual
portion of our nature, even though every wrench, thus loosen
 42

ing us from our lower selves, be painful. So, even when the
toilsome following of duty is not involved, in an action where
the higher motives seem clearly to preponderate, this sense
of the superior right of these motives is none the less present,
and is perhaps not consciously perceived only because its
presence through years of just action has become habitual.
I think, indeed, that we recognise a superior goodness in those
whose virtue is, like the growth of a flower, joyful and uncon
scious, to what we see in those who build themselves painfully
and with effort, as one who would mould the same flower in
wax. Love, in fact, does at a single glance from above what
the sense of duty does slowly from below ; it shews out in the
first splendour of its illumination the real relative value of
things, it touches the mountain summits with a glory which
makes us aspire to reach them, and gently folds away the
hollows and vales of life in the deep mist to which we feel
we can no more descend :
for that higher vision
Poisons all meaner choice for evermore.

But duty stands at our first starting far below the veil of
stretching clouds, and urges us onwards with an unconditional
Excelsior,' when we can see neither sky nor peak nor sunlit
glow, but only that one step is higher than the last, and
cries to us to hold a faith which is the evidence of things
not seen, until a new revelation pierce the clouds with a new
vision of hope.
Art and Nature stand evermore by our side with a spirit
uality which burns brighter and brighter through the veil of
the senses . Evermore they wake in us the consciousness
that each step we take is not of importance for itself alone,
 43

but because it makes our next step the easier ; till at last,
we cannot say when, the veil of material things is rent and
we stand in the sunlight of God's presence : the vision of a
ladder reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels
of light move to and fro with their glad message, till we
exclaim, ' Surely God is in this place, and I knew it not . If
the dream of Jacob tell us nothing else, we cannot doubt
that it teaches that any place or action may become to us
the revelation of God's eternal presence . Nor can we doubt
that all our senses are thus too, if rightly used, fitted to
educate us onward from step to step to a greater and greater
fulness of spiritual life. They are the outward touch of the
Divine hands moulding us from the first dawn of life ever
closer to Himself. Through them the infant derives its first
consciousness ; through them the child learns obedience ; the
boy, courage and power ; the man, thoughtfulness ; and the
artist, everywhere and at every time, a deep communion
with the Spirit of all power and truth, whom to know is
eternal life.

4
 CHAPTER III .

Thus Art is really more cognate to Religion than to a formal

Morality. For if it does not present us directly with the
thought of a personal Deity, yet it delights in everything to
embody the idea of personality or power ; and while it makes
its appeal to us through our emotions and affections, which
ever seek for a personal being to which to attach themselves,
it throws round the object of our search a halo of mystery
which belongs to our thoughts of Him whose ways are past
finding out.
If we now turn to the influence of Art in the various
religious services or ceremonials, we shall see this more
clearly. All religions, from the earliest to the most en
lightened, have embodied the ideas of personality and mys
tery ; the rudest fetichism investing these ideas with all the
terrors of a demon-god, the purest Christianity holding them
as the centre of all emotions of love and sympathy. What
appears to have been the very earliest symbol of deity — the
serpent — seems also to have owed its importance to its
embodiment in one of these two ideas. The snake, with its
glittering, fascinating eyes, intensely alive, unlike all other
creatures, yet exercising mysterious influence on them, even
 45

on man ; endued with inexplicable powers of gliding motion,

a secrecy of movement unassisted by leg or wing or any of
the ordinary means — with these endowments it became, even
in the times of vast civilisations which now sleep in the
thick forests of Ceylon and Burmah, the representative of
highest divinity.
The hieroglyphic tracery, the ' dim religious light of the
Eastern temples, the mystic dances of the Therapeutæ , were
all to a certain extent artistic embodiments of that same
sense of the mysteriousness, the infinitude, of the Being to
whom the worship was paid.
Greece cherished a religion which chiefly embodied the
thought of personality, and which was so closely connected
with their Art that we can scarcely disentangle the two.
Under the hands of their poets and sculptors the great whole
of Nature became a theatre of individual gods. Day and
night, spring and winter, rock and stream and tree were in
vested with a conception of personality whose exact meaning
it is difficult now to determine, but which perhaps in its
highest sense is best expressed by Virgil in his well-known
lines :
Principio cælum ac terram camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum Lunæ Titaniaque astra
Spiritus intus alit : totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.
Thus, to them, Nature became almost one with hu
manity through the gods ; for the latter, drawn from Nature,
were invested with a human shape and became the ancestors
and contemporaries of traditional heroes. And so, finally,
the gods became the mediators, but only the mediators,
between the terrible necessity of Nature and the helplessness
4-2
 46

of humanity. The hapless Edipus might cry to Zeus for

deliverance, but Zeus himself was crowned from above by a
higher power - Nemesis, or the inexorable Ate — who was
indeed nothing else than the unfailing misery which for ever
follows in the wake of evil. The Greek Art thus took to
itself the whole field of theology, and through the mouths
of such men as Æschylus led the nation in a path which we
cannot but call glorions, since it brought forth the philosophy
of the Stoics. But when the Stoical element died away and
the Will of man was no longer called to stand against the
natural forces, Art simultaneously became degraded by sen
suality ; and, dragging down the conception of the gods
with it, left them to be nothing better than a butt for the
shafts of ridicule and contempt .
How different was all this from the results of Brahmin
ism ! yet both sprang from the seeing of divinity in Nature ;
but one people invested this divinity with the strong reflec
tion of its own sense of personality, the other with the
longing for a mystic union in which all should ' fuse the
skirts of self again ’ and remerge into the general soul. And
I think it is not too much to say that, in both cases, Art,
springing up originally as the expression of the religious idea,
became ultimately the leader of that religion, and was re
sponsible to a very great degree for its rise or fall.
In modern times, painting and music have risen by the
side of architecture to great importance in religious service.
As far as the influence of painting is concerned, in respect to
Christianity, I shall not include its bare representation of the
facts of Christ's life as belonging to our subject. In so far
as a picture merely conveys the relation of a fact, it does not
 47

strictly come under the domain of Art ; and, we may also say,
it can have little or no influence on the religious condition of
any beholder. But as soon as a picture conveys something
more than this — the ideal struggle with evil, the triumph of
hope, the purity of a sublime faith - then it becomes a work
of Art, and becomes too a determining power of great import
ance to the spiritual nature of man. How inexpressibly
painful, how little promotive of good is a meanly conceived
and badly executed picture of the crucifixion ! On the other
hand, how beautiful and how full of all great thoughts is one
by some masterhand in which the ' Why hast thou forsaken
me ? ' of the fainting man is crowned by the glorious ' It is
finished ' of the triumphant Godhead. The great Italian
pictures have been, from time to time, since the days of
Cimabue, the rallying points and centres of the love and
religious enthusiasm of the people. And the Madonnas of
Raffaelle or the Sibyls of Guido and Guercino, still hold before
them crowds of gazers, in their silence attesting the deep
thoughts with which they are inspired .
What then are we to say to all the pictures of inferior
Art, or of no Art at all, which fill the various churches of
Europe ? There are many so bad that, even to the most
uncritical and enthusiastic spirit, they can present nothing but
a bare fact — that St Anthony kept pigs for instance, or that
St Benedict lived in a cave and had bread and water brought
to him by a neighbouring monk. These appear to me abso
lutely to do no good, rather, in fact, to do harm ; their direct
tendency is to put forward the superstitious or magical idea
of religion, and to make people wish to be hogherds or to live
in a cave, under the impression that such a proceeding will
 48

put their souls in a more favourable light. It is the same

with pictures of the life of Christ. If they serve only to breed
a familiarity with the mere outward history of his actions,
without setting before people a spiritual example for all time
with a force which urges the beholder to follow it, they
become worse than useless, for they deaden his receptivity by
the force of habit, without leaving him any counterbalancing
advantage .
Again, when a picture has some claim to artistic power,
but does not embody the highest Art, it will certainly carry
many evils along with the good it does ; for though it may, to
an uneducated person or to one wanting in any critical faculty,
seem to awake high feelings and desires ; yet, amongst the
many who will discover glaring errors in it, there are generally
very few , who, at the same time, have sufficient liberality of
mind not to be prejudiced by it against the very religion
which it is meant to uphold. This is just the case with much
ofourchurch music ; but, above all, is it the case with the gaudy
pictures that cover the walls of Roman Catholic churches and
chapels in France and even in Italy. There, a large class of the
educated have sprung aside with contempt from what they call
the religion of the common herd. They, no doubt, despise the
shallowness of doctrine with which the people are put off; but
one great stumblingblock is the tawdry Art which, in gilding
and paint, in altar-piece or vestment, seems to offer an insult
to every educated mind, and to represent a mocking farce
carried on by the priesthood. This last is not perhaps really
the case ; the priests, as a rule, are honest and true men, who
have no intention of presenting to the people a religion that
they do not believe in themselves. But in most cases, no
 49

doubt, they know and recognise that they must present it to

the people in a form somewhat different from that in which
they receive it themselves : as indeed every cultivated man
must know that he must lay aside very much of that which is
most impressive to him, if he would produce any impression
on the mob. Nothing seems more certain and, at the same
time, more disappointing than the reflection that the things
which are the highest in Art, which seem to speak their
message so clearly and beautifully that none could fail to
comprehend, do in reality convey absolutely no impression
to the uncultivated, and that these latter must after all be
educated by means of broad contrasts and violent discords
before they can learn to appreciate the value of proportion
and harmony. But this fact often turns what ought to be the
sympathy of the refined into a mere heartless contempt ; of
evil issue to both parties. This contempt, which converts
those who would be the Liberal section into a mere party of
scoffers, is finding a home in England too as well as in France.
Here too they cannot separate the accidental from the essen
tial, they will not see that men practically connect the same
spiritual thoughts with a great variety of forms chosen ac
cording to their education. So, because their neighbour
derives peace of mind from the singing of the ‘ Old Hun
dredth ,' while they, for their part, are perhaps only pained
by the untuneful efforts of the singers, and would rather, for
the same purpose, seek some secluded scene of Nature ; they,
with great illiberality, charge him with deceit, and would be
glad to see him and his Psalm-tunes and all the concomitants
swept clean away. For this same reason it happens that, in
Germany, the women, who represent the uneducated class, go
 50

to church ; but the men not only do not go, but despise those
who do and the whole affair; and, to a certain extent, for no
other reason than that the composition of the music and of
the hymns and sermon is not of a very high order.
If this is an evil arising from Art of a low order, on the
critical side ; there is also an evil, which we need but briefly
mention here, arising on the sentimental side. Sensation Art,
while it produces certain emotional effects, is really thoroughly
false; it encourages the habit of a passive indulgence in the
excitement of feeling, while by its want of real spirituality it
omits to make any demands for responsive action. Many
will recognise the kind of Art I especially mean in tunes com
posed in minor keys by men who are not really artists, or in
the harrowing novels, unworthy of the name of romance,
which are the works of popular writers of the present day. It
is needless to say that this sensation Art ought to be unfailing
ly banished from all service in religion. Yet there is a good
deal of it in the highly wrought effects of the Roman Catholic
ceremonial, as well as in some of the hymns of our own Church.
But what shall we say of the influence of Art—of painting,
for instance—of a really high class ? Here, I think, there can
be little question that, if it be properly made use of, the good
effect is very great. In one of his smaller writings, Schiller
compares the influence of the drama for good with that of
religion itself. He calls attention to the great difference
there is between the knowledge of what may be right and the
motive powers which induce men to follow the good. Laws,
and commandments, and maxims, may all point out the path,
and to a certain extent disclose the results of not following it ;
but they are after all purely negative ; they offer no self-sub
 51

sistent motive to action. For this we must go to feeling,

which is the motive power that God has given us. If intellect
is the guide to action, feeling is the source of it. Religion is
the highest development of feeling ; and Art, as it ever culti
vates us towards a higher life, makes us more susceptible to
true feeling and more capable of exhibiting that feeling in
right action. In this view a high Art may be of the utmost
importance to religion. Pictures, for instance, truthfully re
presenting the life of Christ in its spiritual beauty, must go
far to make us endeavour to imitate his tenderness and
humility, his wise charity, his unassuming stedfastness, in our
own lives ; they must wake in us deep feelings of reverence
and love and high aspirations seeking for fulfilment in every
thought and action .
What we have said of painting is mostly applicable too
to music and architecture. Anything like sensational music,
that is, music in which truth is sacrificed to the attempt at
false effects, ought to be strictly banished from all service
in religion. Nothing can be more evil than the mockery
which all worship becomes, when people assemble together
in order to enjoy a temporary exaltation of emotion which
will leave them only more depressed and insusceptible of
good influences than before. I think, in this respect, the
whole tenor of religious life among the Roman Catholics is
very much in keeping with the sensational tendency of their
ceremonial . All the responsibility of religious action is
thrown on the priest. For the layman it is sufficient that
his feelings should be deeply moved to penitence for his
sins ; he then confesses to the priest, feels that he is satis
factorily absolved, and then most probably throws all further
 52

care off his mind. The use of penance was formerly much
insisted on, and perhaps rightly enough, in order that the
offender by his continued actions might prove that his re
morse was not a merely evanescent emotion. But the sim
ple impress of good intention which is common to most
people when their feelings are excited is not necessarily of
at all a good tendency ; and may, as is probably the case
if due to bad Art, be productive only of evil.
In architecture there is not so much opportunity for
sensation Art. As a rule, people appear to be susceptible
to the higher effects of good architecture, while that which
is bad produces little or no impression, one way or the
other. There is however, I think, in the modern rage for
gaudy restoration and disproportionate labour bestowed on
carving, an observable tendency in the direction of missing
the spirit in the attention to minute and comparatively un
important details, which is so characteristic of false Art.
In both music and architecture there is much Art of
that mediocre kind which commends itself to the inexpe
rienced, while to others its virtues seem swallowed up in
its many and prominent faults. Practically, it would seem
necessary , if we allow Art at all in the service of religious
ceremonial, to introduce a great deal of Art of this doubt
ful kind. For if the Church is to be the instructor of the
great mass of the people, she must address herself on the
whole, not to those who through their wealth or education
are in this respect comparatively independent of her, and who
can find Art for themselves in their own homes, but to those
who are uneducated and in want of help from without. To
these a very high order of Art would perhaps be in danger
 53

of becoming meaningless. At the same time it is clearly

advisable not to allow a mediocre Art to become too fa
miliar, but on the contrary to urge the popular taste con
stantly towards an appreciation of the best models. And
I do not think that it can ever be really necessary to make
use of a very inferior Art. Let the style be simple enough
and the matter sufficiently easy of comprehension, and it
will not be long before the popular taste comes to appre
ciate and delight in works of really true merit.
I think then that this is worthy of great attention, with
respect to the use of Art simply in our ceremonials. It
ought to be the endeavour of everyone, who has a hand in
such matters, to introduce Art of the very best kind, whether
it be in architecture or painting or church -decoration, or in
the chants and anthems and organ voluntaries. At the same
time, except perhaps in those rare cases in which the congrega
tion is necessarily only taken from the most educated classes,
the Art introduced ought to be very simple in style, especially
in the case of music. The attempt, so common now , to
introduce elaborate services, which only a small minority
perhaps of the congregation can follow , is extremely repre
hensible. It adds to what is already a great evil—the tend
ency to make religious services a luxury and recreation
for the rich , while they cease to present any meaning or
attraction to the poor. Let the music be good, so that it
may as little as possible be a stumblingblock to the refined
taste of the educated ; let it be simple and quiet, so that
all may join in it without difficulty or offence.
Allowing then the importance of Art for the advance
ment of religion, whether in the private life of each indi
 54

vidual or in the public ceremonials of a church ; it remains

for us to ask, with respect to the latter, to what extent the
Art introduced ought to be carried, and how far the ser
vices ought to be made to rely on its use . The answer to
this, if any definite answer can be given, must lie in the
consideration noticed before, that nothing can be of service
to religion when it ceases to produce anything more than
a vague sentiment which springs up forthwith because it has
no depth of earth. As soon therefore as men go to church
with the view (consciously entertained or not) of enjoying
the excitement of striking music, or as soon as the object
of finding a happy means of expressing prayer or thanks
giving and of truly entering into the communion of saints
has given place to the wish for a tension of feeling merely
for its own sake, and therefore not genuine, then the effect
produced has ceased to have any relation to religion, and
can only lead to a false belief in the real worth of the
emotion. As a rule, any excitement which carries a man to
a level of emotion very much above that of his ordinary life
is not genuine—in the sense that it can never find expression
in that man's actions. It is utterly disproportioned to all the
habits and tendencies of his nature, and therefore it is im
possible that he can suddenly turn and twist all that nature
into conformity with it. To raise such violent feeling there
fore, deliberately and artificially, cannot be otherwise than
false and bad. Happily for us, we are not capable of emo
tions and insight very much beyond ourselves. What we
feel or see is through experience derived from ourselves.
If it were not so our progress would indeed be short . If
we could for a moment realise, in all its fulness, the eternal
 55

splendour towards which we are striving, and could then

look back on the weakness and misery of our own attempts,
we should cease all further effort in despair, and so sink
back into the terrible listlessness which contemplates a high
ideal only with the sense of the uselessness of trying to at
tain to it. This is a danger, however, to which the excitable
and imaginative are quite liable enough.
I should say, therefore, that the use of Art in religious
ceremonial ought to be moderate ; it ought, if possible, not
to exceed what is natural and fairly within the limits of ordi
nary life. Of course it is impossible to give any exact rule :
as impossible as it would be to attempt to circumscribe every
man's mind within the same bounds. But, if the Church is
to address herself to the great mass of the people, it soon
becomes tolerably evident that she must choose a mean as
nearly suitable as possible to the ideas of all classes, with a
balance perhaps in favour of the poorer and more ignorant,
because, as I said before, the more educated ought to be able
to lay aside the wish for what might be injurious or unmean
ing to those who have not the same cultivation as themselves.
The instant any outward show or form ceases to be valued
on account of the impulse it gives to the mind towards the
attainment of something beyond, and begins to be only prized
for its own sake, it immediately becomes the source of the
besetting evil of all religions—the superstitious worship of
the symbol. It can hardly be otherwise. The people see
some outward act or object set up as of vast importance, long
after the meaning, which gave it importance, has been for
gotten ; and so they cannot but think that there is some
inherent virtue in the outward thing, independently of any
 56

other consideration. Religion degenerates into magic ; and

spiritual worship becomes ‘ dry as summer dust ' amidst the
stifling aridity of a ceremonial routine.
To take the ritualistic tendency of the last few years :
those more educated men, who see in its many symbols only
the passing forms used to embody high and spiritual thought,
may find in it a great help to devotion and right action ; and
it is quite conceivable that there should be a vast body of
people to whom a service of complicated ritual would be the
only service really suitable. At the same time there are, no
doubt, very many who do not see or consider the truth meant
to be conveyed by these symbols, but only attach importance
to the symbols themselves. These therefore, though they
may frequent the ceremonials, are really learning to worship
the letter instead of the spirit, and are in danger of losing
their sense of religion in the coils of superstition. I take
this case merely as an example that the ceremonial is made
for man, not man for the ceremonial.
Ritualism is good for those to whom it conveys the sense
of something which transcends all ritualism ; bad for those to
whom it is in itself all in all. The absence of all ritual is
good for those to whom it suggests that He whom they
worship cares not for burnt -offering or sacrifice, since all the
beasts of the forest are His and the cattle on a thousand hills,
and that the Spirit bloweth where it listeth, uncaring of the
tradition of men ; bad for those who see in it only a sign that
the touch of the material is hateful and terrible to God,
and that earth and all our natural thoughts and affections
are for ever at deadly warfare with the aspiration of the spirit
within us.
 57

Of all incentives to perfection, the true love of the beauti

ful in the world around us is one of the most powerful and
widely spread. Yet it is not so on account of any inherent
virtue in the outward objects which we call beautiful; they
vanish, they fade away, as words that are borne but for a
moment on the sounding air. What remains, what cannot
perish , is the inner meaning which they bring to our minds.
Though we are not conscious of it, its influence is not lost.
Something is added to the mind which makes it impossible
for it ever to be again as it was before. Thus through our
discipleship to the all of Nature we are nursed and taught
by the Divine wisdom. Through the great fellowship of
human Art do we spread that teaching, influencing each other
daily and hourly, as certainly as perhaps insensibly, upwards
to the very fountain -head of action. In this sense it is indeed
true that we are a part of all that we have met. Every impres
sion of beauty brings with it something new wherewith to
clothe the soul. Nor less is it true that we are a part of all
that we have done. “ Our actions make a moral tradition for
our individual selves . Our spirits haunt the places in which
our bodies have moved. Our mind becomes a mansion for
all lovely forms,' the memory ſa dwelling-place for all sweet
sounds and harmonies. And we may be sure that we may
apply to all true Art those thoughts on the influence of
Nature so beautifully expressed by Wordsworth :
' Tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy ; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
 58

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings .

THE END .

CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS .

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